NEW YORK (AP) — Republican Donald Trump’s rally at Madison Square Garden on Sunday follows a long series of political events at New York City’s storied arena.
The garden has hosted Democratic and Republican national conventions since the 18th century, and in 1939, thousands attended successive Nazi and Communist Party rallies in the run-up to World War II. Marilyn Monroe took the stage to sing “Happy Birthday” to President John F. Kennedy in 1962, cementing the legend surrounding what the New York Knicks announcer called “the most famous arena in the world.”
Here are some highlights from the political history of Madison Square Garden, which has housed four buildings over time.
Grover Cleveland is making a comeback
Grover Cleveland is the only U.S. president to serve two non-consecutive terms. Trump hopes to be second.
After the 1892 Democratic National Convention met in Chicago and nominated Cleveland—who was out of office after serving from 1885 to 1889—he accepted the nomination with a second speech at Madison Square Garden in his home state of New York.
The Evening World reported that “a band stationed on one of the balconies played popular songs, with the audience joining in the chorus of “Ta-ra-ra-boom-de-ay” and “Four years more of Grover.”
Cleveland vowed to cut tariffs, while Trump said imposing high tariffs on foreign goods would boost the U.S. economy. Cleveland then defeated Republican Benjamin Harrison to become both the 24th and 22nd President.
A record-breaking 103 ballots
The Democratic Party, which met at the second Madison Square Garden in 1924, was deeply divided over immigration, Prohibition and the growing prominence of the Ku Klux Klan. The race was deadlocked between William Gibbs McAdoo of California and New York Governor Alfred E. Smith, whom the Klan opposed because he was Roman Catholic.
From June 24 to July 9, vote after vote failed to secure a nomination. The Associated Press reported July 2 that McAdoo “reached the long-sought goal of 500 votes through much frantic work and persuasion and maneuvering by his floor managers, who said they had not yet finished their work.”
It wasn’t enough. After both McAdoo and Smith dropped out, a compromise candidate, former West Virginia Congressman John W. Davis, was nominated on the 103rd ballot; he later lost to Republican Calvin Coolidge.
Speeches by Hoover, Roosevelt
While the first two gardens were located near Madison Square—where Broadway and Fifth Avenue meet at 23rd Street—the third was located northwest of that neighborhood, at Eighth Avenue and West 50th Street. It opened in 1925 and hosted both Herbert Hoover and Franklin Delano Roosevelt during their campaigns.
To Roosevelt, a Democrat who favored “a New Deal for the American people,” Hoover, the incumbent Republican president, said in a speech on October 21, 1932, that he rejected “the proposal to change the entire foundations of our national life “.
Roosevelt defeated Hoover and then spoke at the Garden again during his 1936 and 1940 campaigns.
In a heated speech on October 31, 1936, he railed against “the old enemies of peace – business and financial monopoly, speculation, ruthless banking, class antagonism, sectionalism, war profiteering.” “Never before in our history have these forces been so united against one candidate as they are today,” Roosevelt said. “They are united in their hatred of me – and I welcome their hatred.”
Nazis, communists gather
More than 20,000 people attended a rally in the Garden on February 20, 1939, organized by the German-American Bund, a pro-Nazi group that hung swastikas next to a giant portrait of George Washington.
The group’s national secretary, James Wheeler-Hill, claimed that if the first U.S. president were still alive, “he would be friends with Adolf Hitler.” Bund leader Fritz Kuhn wore a Nazi armband and called for “a socially just, white, non-Jewish-governed United States” and “non-Jew-controlled unions, free from Jewish, Moscow-controlled rule.”
A Jewish protester, 26-year-old Isadore Greenbaum, stormed onto the stage. The AP reported what happened next:
“Immediately a dozen or more stormtroopers attacked him, knocking him down and beating him while he held his head in his arms and his black, wild hair flowed. A squad of police pushed the stormtroopers aside, picked him up from the platform floor, held him high above their heads, and ran toward an exit. Most of his clothing was torn from his body. He was later charged with disorderly conduct.
The 1930s were also the peak of the Communist Party’s popularity in the United States. Police estimated that a week after the Bund meeting, 16,000 to 17,000 people attended a communist rally in the garden. CPUSA general secretary Earl Browder said the allegations that American communists took their orders from Moscow constituted “a slanderous attack” spread by supporters of the “anti-Comintern alliance of Rome-Berlin-Tokyo warmongers,” the reported AP.
President’s birthday party
On May 19, 1962, the garden’s third edition hosted a Democratic Party fundraiser and birthday party for John F. Kennedy, where Marilyn Monroe wore a skin-tight dress to serenade the president.
It was the hottest May Day in New York City’s history, with temperatures reaching 99 degrees (37 degrees Celsius). “Heat was still heating up in the Garden when the president remarked, ‘I can retire from politics now,’ after a sultry rendition of Marilyn Monroe’s ‘Happy Birthday,'” the AP reported.
Monroe and Kennedy both died within a year and a half of each other, she from a drug overdose and he from an assassin’s bullet.
George Wallace campaigns in New York
Opened in 1968 about a mile south of its predecessor, the current Garden is home to the NBA’s Knicks and the NHL’s Rangers and hosts musical performances, prizefights and other spectacles.
George Wallace, the former and future governor of Alabama, gave a speech during his 1968 presidential run as the American Independent Party candidate in which he advocated “Stand Up for America” for the kind of populist nationalism that inspired Trump’s “Make America Great.” “Defines Again” movement.
Wallace’s campaign was less explicitly racist than in Alabama, but he championed law and order: As protesters interrupted the Garden rally, Wallace questioned why Democratic and Republican leaders were “capitulating to these anarchists.”
“There are no riots in Alabama. “They start a riot down there and the first one of them to pick up a brick gets a bullet in the brain, that’s all,” Wallace said.
Republican Richard Nixon then defeated Democrats Hubert Humphrey and Wallace to win the presidency.
Meeting place for Democrats and Republicans
The 1976, 1980 and 1992 Democratic National Conventions and the 2004 Republican National Convention also took place in this garden.
When Jimmy Carter accepted his nomination, he alluded to the Vietnam War and the Watergate scandal. “Our country has been through a time of torment,” Carter said. “It is now a time of healing. We want to have faith again. We want to be proud again. We just want the truth again.”
Carter returned in 1980 and faced a challenge from Massachusetts Senator Ted Kennedy, who lacked the delegates he needed. AP reporters noted that Kennedy’s “futile struggle to reverse the odds was symbolized in the convention center, where its tiny rooms contrasted with five large, white trailers decorated in Carter’s campaign green from which the president’s men headed Congress.” led.”
Carter won the nomination but lost the election to Republican Ronald Reagan.
When Democrats met again in 1992, Bill Clinton accepted his nomination in a 52-minute speech that “tested the attention of many in the partisan audience,” according to AP political reporter David Espo. Clinton promised “a government that is leaner, not meaner; a government that expands opportunity, not bureaucracy.”
The Republican Party held its only convention at Madison Square Garden in 2004, when New York was still reeling from the attacks on the World Trade Center.
“We will build a safer world and a more hopeful America, and nothing will hold us back,” said President George W. Bush.
In the city outside, more than 1,800 people were arrested demonstrating against the Iraq war and for other causes.
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Researcher Rhonda Shafner contributed to this report.
